coceks sirtos and lungas

[Joshua Horowitz <horowitz...>]

Budowitz Website: http://www.budowitz.com

The funny thing about the new-fangled Turceascas, is that they use the same
subdivision as the Bulgar, an 8/8 meter which is divided into 3+3+2, like
Paul said. But the Bulgar accompaniment uses only the root and 5th for its
notes, and the typical Cymbalom Turceascas that Paul mentions outline the
7th chord. So here's the comparison:

Old Jewish Bulgar (in C):
C   G C   C G

Romanian Turceasca:

C   E G    Bb C

The Bulgar uses the lower G, whereas the Turceasca goes from bottom to top,
usually.

The new Bulgar goes:

C   G C    G C

So rhythmically they may have the same source. But what klezmer music calls
a grikhisher or terkisher is nothing more than a a simple sirto rhythm,
reduced to its prototypic lowest common denominator recognizable cliche, the
dotted eighth-sixteenth-eighth-eighth rhythm. I don't think there are any
European written examples, and as far as I know no recorded examples of
terkishers or grikhishers on European soil. Its an American thing, kinda
like in Jazz when you say, "let's play this tune as a bossa nova," there's a
couple of cliche's which the bass player and drummer barf up and the melody
player plays straight eighths instead of swing eighths and "presto!" you
have a bossa. Maybe that kind of thing developed out of the New York scene,
where klezmer players commonly played Greek gigs and that was the code for
sounding Greek.

In spite of that, there seems to be a connection to the  Ottoman Lunga
(called Sirto by Greeks). The globalization, i.e. watering down of "foreign"
forms has been happening for a long time. The 19th century Italian opera
composer Giuseppi Donizetti was appointed director of court music in
Constantinople and built up a European orchestra there, which
had a tremendous influence on Ottoman music of the period. Josh Horowitz

> "Helen Winkler" <winklerh (at) hotmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> This might be a silly question but I'll ask it anyways.  Given that there
>> was so much interplay between klezmer and Rom musicians, I was wondering if
>> there was such a thing as a klezmer cocek in European klezmer repertoire?
>
> Here is a possible, but probably not likely, connection:  _cocek_ is
> the Macedonian name for a Gypsy woman's dance, using the same or
> similar rhythm as the Turkish cifte-telli. In Romania today, the name
> for essentially the same thing is _manea_. Most of the music played
> at Gypsy weddings these days (or at least to the extent that I've
> seen or heard) are recent borrowings from Serbian "newly-composed"
> music or Turkish pop music, etc. This rhythm is also used in a genre
> called _turceasca_ ("Turkish"), which is played as a cimbalom
> showpiece at the end of the wedding reception (sometimes as a kind of
> "contest"). The accompaniment patterns on the cimbalom in the
> _turceasca_ or _manea_ are the same.
>
> This leads to a possible link between the _turceasca_ and the
> _terkish_. Zev Feldman says that the _terkish_ or _terkisher_ uses
> the same rhythm as the Greek _sirto_. The basic rhythm of the
> _turceasca_ is eighth note-quarter note-eighth note-quarter note-
> quarter note, while a _sirto_ is dotted quarter note-eighth note-
> quarter note-quarter note. But could they be the same? The sirto does
> not seem to have a living counterpart in Romania today. Since there
> are versions in Jewish tradition of the sarba, hora, doina oltului,
> hangu, etc., why not turceasca too?
>
> Paul Gifford
>
>
> 

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+